13 Computer Vision News Computer Vision News Alice Lucas Alice Lucas is a computer vision engineer at Meero in Paris. What do you do at Meero? I work in a team of developers. We’re what we call a feature team, where we try to deploy features to clients as fast as possible. My specific role is to develop and deploy computer vision algorithms that are going to serve our customers’ needs. Specifically, we work on a product for real estate agents. Those are our target clients. We’re going to automatically enhance and edit their images such that they are more sellable. Is that what you wanted to do, or is that the thing that found you? Well, I guess the product part is the thing that found me. [laughs] I don’t have any particular love for real estate, but we work on algorithms such as image enhancement and editing, which since the PhD has been the family of algorithms that I’ve worked with. Hosting someone who has not gone down the typical academic path is very refreshing. What is your story? At first, it was kind of traditional, I guess. Bachelor, then combined master’s and PhD at Northwestern. I mean, I do love research, and I tend to romanticize academia a little bit. I enjoyed being an expert in this one field and really knowing what I’m talking about and learning about something every day and writing and all of that, but I also do have this drive to get things done. Even if I think about my PhD work, sometimes it has this feeling it’s a bit of incremental work. The competition aspect is not something I’m that comfortable with. The whole number of citations and the conferences, it’s something that’s a bit overwhelming, even if I have the love for what I do. It’s just a nicer feeling to be able to be in an industry setting and just deploy things and really have your thing being used by the client, getting client feedback, and iterating over that. I kind of like that! Is it not also very competitive to work with clients? You might have competitors who promise to do a better job than you. It is. I guess maybe it’s because it’s less individualistic. You know, I’m part of a team. I feel like there’s this team effort. It’s not just me; it’s the other developers, also. I have two other computer vision engineers working with me, so the three of us, maybe there’s this like collective aspect that makes us feel stronger against the competition. Now, Alice, we want to know your citation number! [laughs] Go check it out on Google
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